Every apparel and footwear brand has to find a way to deal with products that cannot be sold: items with manufacturing defects found after distribution, goods damaged in transit, unsold stock and products needing late-stage finishing. 

The default response has been destruction. The EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation changes this: from 19 July 2026 large companies may not destroy unsold apparel, clothing accessories or footwear. This obligation will apply to medium-sized in 2030. Furthermore, Article 24 requires brands to disclose what happened to discarded products.

Flexireo has developed a service for managing non-conforming and unsold apparel so that destruction becomes the last resort and every outcome is documented. 

There are three steps:

• First, each blocked batch is scored on economic, technical and regulatory factors to identify its realistic recovery options. 

• Second, the batch is routed to the most circular viable route: reconditioning or repair, preparation for reuse, donation, recycling or other recovery, with disposal used only when no higher route is feasible and the reason recorded. 

• Third, every route, including the share that must be scrapped, feeds a single audit trail aligned with the Article 24 disclosure fields.

The approach was developed over two years with the quality teams of a multi-country European sporting goods retailer and one of its rework partners, inside a live operation. The coordinating platform is Flexireo, by Delvaris OÜ (Estonia).

Customers can choose one of three tiers based on what they need to coordinate: just reconditioning, the full ESPR flow or enterprise-scale operations.